Theory of water and charged liquid bridges

The phenomena of liquid bridge formation due to an applied electric field is investigated. A new solution for the charged catenary is presented which allows to determine the static and dynamical stability conditions where charged liquid bridges are possible. The creeping height, the bridge radius and length as well as the shape of the bridge is calculated showing an asymmetric profile in agreement with observations. The flow profile is calculated from the Navier Stokes equation leading to a mean velocity which combines charge transport with neutral mass flow and which describes recent experiments on water bridges.Comment: 10 pages 12 figures, misprints corrected, assumptions more transparen

Elasticity-driven Nanoscale Texturing in Complex Electronic Materials

Finescale probes of many complex electronic materials have revealed a non-uniform nanoworld of sign-varying textures in strain, charge and magnetization, forming meandering ribbons, stripe segments or droplets. We introduce and simulate a Ginzburg-Landau model for a structural transition, with strains coupling to charge and magnetization. Charge doping acts as a local stress that deforms surrounding unit cells without generating defects. This seemingly innocuous constraint of elastic `compatibility', in fact induces crucial anisotropic long-range forces of unit-cell discrete symmetry, that interweave opposite-sign competing strains to produce polaronic elasto-magnetic textures in the composite variables. Simulations with random local doping below the solid-solid transformation temperature reveal rich multiscale texturing from induced elastic fields: nanoscale phase separation, mesoscale intrinsic inhomogeneities, textural cross-coupling to external stress and magnetic field, and temperature-dependent percolation. We describe how this composite textured polaron concept can be valuable for doped manganites, cuprates and other complex electronic materials.Comment: Preprin

Three-Dimensional Elastic Compatibility: Twinning in Martensites

We show how the St.Venant compatibility relations for strain in three dimensions lead to twinning for the cubic to tetragonal transition in martensitic materials within a Ginzburg-Landau model in terms of the six components of the symmetric strain tensor. The compatibility constraints generate an anisotropic long-range interaction in the order parameter (deviatoric strain) components. In contrast to two dimensions, the free energy is characterized by a "landscape" of competing metastable states. We find a variety of textures, which result from the elastic frustration due to the effects of compatibility. Our results are also applicable to structural phase transitions in improper ferroelastics such as ferroelectrics and magnetoelastics, where strain acts as a secondary order parameter

Defect-induced incompatibility of elastic strains: dislocations within the Landau theory of martensitic phase transformations

In dislocation-free martensites the components of the elastic strain tensor are constrained by the Saint-Venant compatibility condition which guarantees continuity of the body during external loading. However, in dislocated materials the plastic part of the distortion tensor introduces a displacement mismatch that is removed by elastic relaxation. The elastic strains are then no longer compatible in the sense of the Saint-Venant law and the ensuing incompatibility tensor is shown to be proportional to the gradients of the Nye dislocation density tensor. We demonstrate that the presence of this incompatibility gives rise to an additional long-range contribution in the inhomogeneous part of the Landau energy functional and to the corresponding stress fields. Competition amongst the local and long-range interactions results in frustration in the evolving order parameter (elastic) texture. We show how the Peach-Koehler forces and stress fields for any distribution of dislocations in arbitrarily anisotropic media can be calculated and employed in a Fokker-Planck dynamics for the dislocation density. This approach represents a self-consistent scheme that yields the evolutions of both the order parameter field and the continuous dislocation density. We illustrate our method by studying the effects of dislocations on microstructure, particularly twinned domain walls, in an Fe-Pd alloy undergoing a martensitic transformation.Comment: 24 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. B (changes from v1 include mainly incorporation of discrete slip systems; densities of crystal dislocations are now tracked explicitly

In Situ SR-XPS Observation of Ni-Assisted Low-Temperature Formation of Epitaxial Graphene on 3C-SiC/Si

Low-temperature (~1073 K) formation of graphene was performed on Si substrates by using an ultrathin (2 nm) Ni layer deposited on a 3C-SiC thin film heteroepitaxially grown on a Si substrate. Angle-resolved, synchrotron-radiation X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (SR-XPS) results show that the stacking order is, from the surface to the bulk, Ni carbides(Ni(3)C/NiC(x))/graphene/Ni/Ni silicides (Ni(2)Si/NiSi)/3C-SiC/Si. In situ SR-XPS during the graphitization annealing clarified that graphene is formed during the cooling stage. We conclude that Ni silicide and Ni carbide formation play an essential role in the formation of graphene